The Many Forms of Motherhood
What defines a mother? Does she need to be blood related to a child, or just consider that child to be family? Does her child need to grow up, does she need to raise her from infancy to adulthood?
These are the questions our May pieces wrestled with.
On Mother’s Day, we published Lindsey Danis’s essay about how Kamala Harris’s embrace of her stepmother-hood threw Lindsey’s own relationship with her father’s new family into sharp relief. It’s a piece that’s at once extremely personal and broadly accessible – after all, haven’t we all felt like outsiders at some time or another? I know plenty of us have felt isolated within our own families.
Last weekend, we published Mary Wasacz’s heartbreaking story of taking her two young children to visit their baby sister in the NICU. Baby Cathy Anne was diagnosed with Trisomy 18 shortly after her birth, and her parents were warned that she was unlikely to last a month. Mary and her husband decided to bring Cathy Anne home for the rest of her life, against the doctors’ advice – it was important to them that the family envelop her, no matter how brief her time on earth.
These are exactly the kinds of stories we crave here at Moments Between: deeply personal experiences that are nonetheless universal in some way. We hope you found Lindsey and Mary’s writing as compelling as we did – and we hope you’ll submit your stories (and poems and comics!) to us. We look forward to reading them.
xo,
